/lit/ - Literature

As he stood under the greasy smear of the fluorescent lights at the register, Ray stared, eyes glazed over in dull apathy, out at the empty restaurant. He could barely gleam his reflection in the big windows across the room that smelled of stale french fries and flat soda. What he did see did not completely register. He was featureless, indistinguishable. He was faceless. His hair was combed back and deep purple sacks weighed down heavy on his eyes, begging him to shut them, begging him to sleep. But his shift did not end for another seven hours and so as always his eyes bore the weight of the time and he stayed conscious in the comatose drift that was the graveyard shift.
The hum of the light reminded him of the cicadas. It was his dad’s home in the woods where he’d spent his summers. In his memory that wilderness was edenic and smeared in the warm sunshine yellow of nostalgia. He would climb up to the little beach a mile or two away from the house and sit there for hours looking downstream, until sunset most days. On others he would sit in the fields to see the lazy afternoons and watch the trees sway slowly in that mellow summer wind. The cicadas would roar their chant in these afternoons, and he would be transfixed on that sound, that cacophony of insect choir. They would still be there when dusk seeped into the sky. He remembered sitting on a fence and watching a storm roll in on the byzantine evening sky, heat lightning dashing across the bulbous, pregnant thunderheads, the insects whooping their summer war anthem all the while. He remembered the air right then, heavy and palpable with the tension of the impending storm. And then with a great boom like a barrel rolling down the stairs the thunder would burst and the storm would crack and–
The cold of the restaurant was back and it seemed like a dream washed away because there were no cicadas; there was only the inhuman metallic drone of the light, that hymn for the sleepless, hypnotizing and eternal.
He missed the oppressive heat of late August, missed the silhouettes of the trees against sunset as he rode down the road on his bike, the wind making his eyes water. He made himself sick with memory and so he wiped down all the tables for the third time that night and tried not to look at his reflection in the windows